I was really hoping that this – my first opinion column – would be the most witty, sage summary of the college experience ever. But I don’t know what advice to give and what memories to highlight because I’m feeling the same emotions I spent most of my college career feeling — rootless, stumbling and sprawled.

This uncertainty makes sense, especially after witnessing the events unfolding on college campuses in recent weeks. How we define what it means to be a college student, a journalist and a twenty-something entering the workforce is changing. It no longer feels like an angsty overstatement to write that.

I wish I could say that I spent this past year as managing editor at the Massachusetts Daily Collegian serenely learning to navigate and accept these uncertainties, but I spent most of it in stubborn and exhausting opposition.

And yet, when I think back on my college experiences, the most precious, joyful moments, and the ones where I learned the most and possibly even I gained a shred of wisdom worth writing about in this column were the ones that spawned from uncertainty and that were grossly unproductive and uneventful: Interviews while reporting on a story that devolved into fascinating, but ultimately unusable conversations; kitchen-sink dinner parties; Collegian staffers debating everything under the sun (including the sun itself) in the office; attending a lecture for a major I wasn’t majoring in; worshipping UV-index 7 while sprawled on the campus green; the hitchhiker (oops, Esther); live music on a bleary Tuesday night.

But that is the witty insight I can leave here with: there’s nothing wrong with stumbling, searching for something with your whole being, leaning into the chaos, and the Collegian is a great place to do it.

This is a place where your intensity and passion will be matched and probably surpassed, a place where the ideas that you can’t stop turning over in your mind can be transformed and published. Meeting all of it with open arms, the Collegian has an almost sporadic and frenetic energy, which is the magic of being young and decisive and at a paper that allows you to be both.

I’m fortunate to have found the Collegian as my home base for all my journalistic curiosity and coming-of-age chaos, and I couldn’t recommend it more. And I’m grateful to have spent the past year in service to this paper, making sure the Collegian can keep being that place for other students and hopefully making it a little better, easier for students to try it out.

So, if everything is urgently unknown and changing, where does that leave us? I’m not going to act like there’s an answer to that. But the Collegian has taught me that if you can practice leaning into the unknown, just for a minute, things become so much better than you could know.

I’ve met some truly wonderful people along the way, who put up with my daily streams of pretentious and mercurial ramblings, like the bit above. I’m so thankful for: good-cop Luke and the hardest working people I know, Justin and Kelly, and Luke H and Jack. Caitlin and Johnny, I’m so excited to see where you take the Collegian next year; I couldn’t imagine more passionate and caring people to guide the paper.

There are a lot of things from college I’m dragging with me into the unfamiliar future: multiple unmatched hoop earrings, precious friendships, a defunct iClicker and lots of half-baked concepts about our shared humanity. After four years, the Collegian won’t be coming with me, oddly enough. Endings are so awkwardly bittersweet, and the path forward remains so unknown. Thankfully, the Collegian taught me that’s when the good stuff starts happening.

Grace Fiori was the Managing Editor. She can be reached at [email protected].